did we outfit national security in a way that made us feel better but did not make us safer? >> al qaeda has been decimated, and a lot of the al qaeda leaders, including bin laden, are dead. but are we safer as a nation? look at the money being spent. and money being spent is real threat. if you accumulate debt, debt is what brings down empires. >> well, it's a difference between safety and strength. >> well put. >> if you can be provoked into reacting in a way that prevents something like that from happening again, but that also causes you to spend yourself into weakness, or to make yourself weak in other ways or to remove the things about you that made you a desirable and proud place in the first place. >> if you swing wildly at something and you have exhausted yourself, did they get you to compromise on your national -- your strategic strength in order to react to them? maybe you have. and then look at what the impact has had on the real people fighting this war -- the military, for example. this has been a generation, a generation has come that has been defined by the war